—Spencer Robert Author, The Politically Incorrect Guide to ...crusadesbook.com › the-glory-of-the-crusades-sample.pdf · Author, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and

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“Steve Weidenkopf explodes common myths about the Crusades and reveals the nobility and heroism of the Crusaders. This is the book to give to anyone who invokes the Crusades as a blot on the Church’s record.”

— Robert Spencer Author, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)

“This excellent book employs decades of scholarly research to show average readers what medieval historians have long known—that popular culture’s image of the Crusades has nothing at all to do with the events themselves. Catholics who cringe at the mention of the Crusades will find in this work a surprising and inspiring story of faith.”

— Thomas F. Madden Director, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Saint Louis University

“The Glory of the Crusades is valuable not only as history but also as a scholarly debunking of centuries of Protestant and Enlightenment distortion of the facts about the West’s struggles against militant Islam.”

— Rev. C. John MCcloskey Research fellow, Faith and Reason Institute

How can the Crusades be called “glorious”? Our modern mindset says they were ugly wars of greed and religious intolerance—a big reason why Christians and Muslims today can’t coexist peacefully.

Historian Steve Weidenkopf challenges this received narrative. Drawing on the latest and most authentic medieval scholarship, he presents a compelling case for understanding the Crusades as they were when they happened: “armed pilgrimages” driven by a holy zeal to recover conquered Christian lands. Without whitewashing their failures and even crimes, he debunks the numerous myths about the Crusades that our secular culture uses as clubs to attack the Church.

In place of these myths he offers men and women of faith and valor who pledged their lives for the honor of Christ’s holy places. With a storyteller’s gift, Weidenkopf relates the Crusades’ many dramas—their heroes and villains, battles and sieges, intrigues and coincidences—offering a vivid and engrossing account of events that have profoundly affected the course of our world to the present day.

Steve Weidenkopf teaches Church history at the Notre Dame Graduate School of Christendom College. He is the creator of the Epic video series and a popular author and speaker on the Crusades and other historical subjects.

Steve Weidenkopf

The Glory of the Crusades

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Contents

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Author Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

1. An Attack on the Crusades and the Church . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

2. Birth of the Crusades . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

3. Jerusalem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

4. Warrior-Monks, Preachers, and the Second Crusade . . . . . 79

5. The Sultan and the Kings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

6. Fiasco of the Fourth Crusade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

7. A Saint and a Sinner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

8. The End of the Crusader States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185

9. Defending Christendom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207

10. The Crusades and the Modern World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

Timeline of Crusades and Other Major Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .242

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .245

About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251

Endnotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .253


17

I

An Attack on the Crusades and the Church

The Roman pontiffs and the European princes were engaged at first in these crusades by a principle of superstition only, but when in the process of time they learnt by experience that these holy wars

contributed much to increase their opulence and to extend their authority . . . [then] ambition and avarice seconded and enforced the

dictates of fanaticism and superstition.

Johann Lorenz von Mosheim (1693–1755), German Lutheran historian1

Criticizing the Church is not a new phenomenon—it is almost as old as the Church itself. Attacks on the Church’s teachings and the persecution of its faithful are a mainstay of its history. However, what is relatively new is the misuse of historical events to undermine the Church and its teachings. This “historical at-tack” began in the fires of the Protestant Revolution but in the modern world has become a trite, overused tactic against the Church. Nonetheless, it has proven quite effective, as many peo-ple in today’s society (including, unfortunately, many Catho-lics) believe the false history presented by critics. Influenced by the media, Hollywood, and other outlets, popular perception of historical events reigns supreme even when that perception is completely at odds with historical reality.

The Importance of Learning Church History

The historical attack is largely successful because Catholics do not know their own history. This is not to fault the individual Catholic, since Church history is not often a subject taught in


THE GLORY OF THE CRUSADES18

schools and universities—or, at least, it is not often well-taught. Still, knowing our history well helps us know who we are. Knowing our history badly will negatively influence our world-view and cloud our relationship with the Church.

It is also important to learn Church history in order to de-fend the Church against its critics. The accepted historical nar-rative presented in the English-speaking world is centered on a predominantly Protestant perspective. This perspective is not amenable to an authentic understanding of Catholic history. As a result, most Catholics throughout their educational careers are provided an English Protestant interpretation of historical events that warps and dismisses the Catholic story.2 It is the nec-essary work of Catholic historians to undo the false aspects of this Protestant view as well as provide an authentic Catholic narrative in order to assist the faithful in defending the Church.

The Crusades

The Crusades are among the most misused and, by far, the most misunderstood endeavors in all Church history. In the minds of most modern people the very word “Crusade” conjures nega-tive images of blood-thirsty, barbaric, and greedy European no-bles setting out to conquer peaceful Muslims living in the Holy Land. These images are reinforced by the media, both in print and film. Hollywood last addressed the Crusades in the 2005 movie Kingdom of Heaven, which purports to tell the story of the Kingdom of Jerusalem during the reign of Baldwin IV, the “Leper King.” The film’s storyline includes the dramatic Battle of Hattin and the siege and loss of Jerusalem to the Muslim gen-eral Saladin. Provided with such dramatic and engaging story arcs, the movie had the potential to be a true masterpiece and an example of authentic history on screen.

Unfortunately, the director and producers decided to rely on faulty and even damaging popular imaginations of the Crusades rather than on historical fact. Jonathan Riley-Smith, one of the foremost authorities on the Crusades today, remarked the film was


AN ATTACK ON THE CRUSADES AND THE CHURCH 19

“Osama bin Laden’s version of history.”3 Although the film was highly anticipated, it did not do very well at the domestic US box office, taking in a mere $47 million (it cost $130 million to make).4

It is extremely frustrating for serious scholars of the Crusades to witness these events thoroughly maligned and misrepresented in the media. However, the fact is “Crusading was always con-troversial,”5 and there were many critics even throughout the Crusading movement itself. What is particularly aggravating about modern criticism is that despite the significant amount of serious scholarship over the last forty years, popular perception remains shaped by outdated and false images. As one modern Crusades historian recently remarked, “The Crusades remain one of the few subjects of professional history that carry wide popular recognition even if little serious understanding.”6

A survey of this landscape of popular misconceptions about the Crusades reveals seven main myths, which this book will refute:

1. The Crusades were wars of unprovoked aggression.2. The Crusaders were motivated primarily by greed and the

prospect for plunder and riches.3. When Jerusalem was liberated in 1099, the Crusaders killed

all the inhabitants of the city—so much blood was spilled that it ran ankle deep.

4. The Crusades were colonial enterprises.5. The Crusades were also wars against the Jews and should be

seen as the first Holocaust.6. The Crusades were wars of conversion.7. The Crusades are the source of the modern tension between

Islam and the West.

Seeds of the Myths

The creation of these myths began in the sixteenth century when Protestant authors used the still-ongoing Crusades to attack the Church and, principally, the papacy. Most Protestant critics of that time viewed the Crusades as the creation of the anti-Christ



(the pope) to increase Church wealth. Crusaders were portrayed as ignorant followers of superstition who participated in holy wars, which were nothing more than examples of Catholic big-otry and cruelty. Protestant teaching was completely opposed to the Crusading movement because it necessitated obedience to the papacy, preserved the unity of Christendom, and provided spiritual benefits (indulgences).7

Martin Luther set the stage for the Protestant interpretation of the Crusades by seeing the Ottoman Turkish threat to Eu-rope in the early sixteenth century as part of God’s plan for divine retribution against the evils of the Catholic Church. At the height of his revolution against the Church, Luther wrote, “to fight against the Turks is to oppose the judgment God vis-its upon our iniquities through them.”8 After a Turkish inva-sion force reached the gates of Vienna in 1529, Luther reconsid-ered his anti-Crusade stance and actually encouraged Christian princes (Catholic and Protestant alike) to join together to fight the Turkish horde. Of course, Luther did not actually call for a Crusade, nor did he desire a religious war resembling the Cru-sades. He steadfastly rejected any such notion by writing, “If in my turn I were a soldier and saw in the battlefield a priest’s ban-ner or cross, even if it were the very crucifix, I should want to run away as though the devil were chasing me!”9

Watering the Myths

If these Reformation-era writers were the first to view the Cru-sades through the lens of anti-papal rhetoric, seeing the entire effort as nothing other than a vast waste of European resources undertaken by barbaric, superstitious warriors, these themes received increasing nourishment once combined with the new anti-Church hostility of the Enlightenment.

Centered in France and occupying the seventeenth and eigh-teenth centuries, the philosophical movement known as the En-lightenment sought to weaken the influence of the Church in European society. Enlightenment thinking affected most areas



of life, including the study and presentation of history. Crusade history was used by intellectuals “not as a historical study in its own right but as a tool in conceptual arguments about religion and the progress of civilization.”10 The Crusades would continue to be used in this way by future generations to further their own agenda against society and the Church.11

The main Enlightenment critics of the Crusades were the Frenchmen Voltaire and Denis Diderot, and England’s David Hume and Edward Gibbon. Voltaire (1694–1778) waged a fierce campaign of satire and ridicule against the Catholic Church. In 1751 he published an essay on the Crusades in which he de-scribed them as an “epidemic of fury which lasted for 200 years and which was always marked by every cruelty, every perfidy, every debauchery, and every folly of which human nature is capable.”12 He further opined that the Crusades were “wasteful, pointless, ruined by excessive papal ambition for worldly power, an example of the corrosive fanaticism of the middle ages.”13

Diderot (1713–1784) also saw the Crusades in a wholly nega-tive light and criticized them for the despoliation of Europe. Diderot wrote that the consequences of these “horrible wars” were “the depopulation of its nations, the enrichment of monas-teries, the impoverishment of the nobility, the ruin of ecclesias-tical discipline, contempt for agriculture, scarcity of cash and an infinity of vexations.”14 Diderot also complained that the Cru-sades were worthless enterprises of savagery in which European knights were sent by the Church to “cut the inhabitant’s throats and seize a rocky peak [ Jerusalem] which was not worth one drop of blood.”15

Hume (1711–1776) believed the Muslim world was superior in “science and humanity” and the Crusades were “the most signal and most durable monument to human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.”16

The reflections of Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) on the Cru-sades mimicked the writings of his fellow “enlightened” think-ers principally in the thought that the Crusades brought nothing but negative consequences to Europe. In Gibbon’s mind, the



Crusaders were ignorant and superstitious criminals manipu-lated by the Church:

At the voice of their pastor, the robber, the incendiary, the homicide, arose by their thousands to redeem their souls by repeating on the infidels the same deeds which they exercised against their Christian brethren; and the terms of atonement were eagerly embraced by offenders of every rank and denomi-nation. None were pure; none were exempt from the guilt and penalty of sin; and those who were the least amenable to the justice of God and the Church were the best entitled to the temporal and eternal recompense of their pious courage.17

Gibbon also believed that the primary motivation of the Cru-saders was greed, with Western warriors bent on the pursuit of “mines of treasures, of gold and diamonds, of palaces of marble and jasper, and of odoriferous groves of cinnamon and frank-incense.”18 This erroneous view of Crusader motivations, still commonly held, may be Gibbon’s enduring mark on the popular history of the Crusades.

Modern Scholarship

In the early twentieth century, the Crusades were brushed with a colonial color which later greatly influenced (and still influ-ences) modern Islamic understanding of the movement. The dissolution of the Ottoman Turkish Empire after its defeat in the First World War produced colonial mandates for the British and French in the Middle East. These European powers used Crusading imagery to describe their overseas colonies. A Lon-don magazine published a cartoon of King Richard I watching the British marching into Jerusalem with the words, “At last my dream come true.”19 The French commander of Syria, General Henri Gouraud, was reported to have remarked, “Behold, Sala-din, we have returned.”20 The main author who contributed to this colonial interpretation of the Crusades was the Frenchman



Rene Grousset (1858–1952). However, within a half-century of the publication of his History of the Crusades,21 most scholars had thoroughly rebuked Grousset’s colonial view.

As the twentieth century reached its midpoint, another group of historians would interpret the Crusades through the lens of economics. For these Marxist scholars, the Crusades were colonial endeavors motivated by economic factors impacted by the growth in medieval population and the shortage of resources in Europe.

Additionally, most historians of the early to mid twentieth century viewed the Crusades in a wholly negative light because of a personal animus against religion as a whole. These scholars could not fathom the idea of warriors with actual faith engaging in warfare for primarily religious reasons. Instead these critics believed the “medieval crusades were evil precisely because they were wars of religion.”22

More recent Crusades scholarship has been shaped by the writ-ings of two historians who had vastly different careers. Carl Erd-mann (1898–1945) was a brilliant scholar whose work, The Origins of the Idea of Crusading (1935) examined the Crusades as an out-growth of the papal reform movement in the eleventh century, which primarily sought to ensure the independence of the papacy and Church against secular interference. He also expanded the scope of the Crusades to any area where Christian warriors, mo-tivated by spiritual incentives, engaged in armed conflict. Unfor-tunately, Erdmann would die relatively young at the age of forty-seven while serving in the German Wehrmacht in the Balkans.23

More than any other historian, Steven Runciman (1903–2000) shaped modern popular understanding of the Crusades, and his interpretation continues to influence Hollywood and the media.24 Runciman specialized in Byzantine history, and in his still-influential three-volume History of the Crusades (1951–1954) viewed the Crusades through that prism. Most modern Crusades scholars are highly critical of Runciman’s work, for although it is well written and engaging it is more literature than history, and is colored by Runciman’s Byzantine leanings. Christopher Tyerman wrote, “The scholarship is wide but not



deep; the literary technique effective in short stretches but taken in large doses tends to indigestion.”25 Runciman was another historian, in a long line, who failed to view the Crusades from a contemporary point of view, making his work “dated in tech-nique, style and content; derivative, misleading, tendentious; a polemic, masquerading as epic.”26

Nonetheless, Runciman shaped modern popular perception of the Crusades, Crusaders, and medieval Muslims by illustrat-ing Western warriors as simple barbarians bent on the destruction of a peaceful and sophisticated Islamic culture. He saw Western Europe as over-populated, violent, and economically stagnant; the Crusades were thus “great barbarian invasions.”27 In contrast to the barbaric and ruthless Western warriors, the Muslim gen-eral Saladin was presented as the perfect ruler who was merciful, considerate, tolerant, modest, and intellectual. In essence, Saladin was reduced by Runciman “to a catalogue of nineteenth-century English upper-class virtues.”28 Ultimately, Runciman condemned the Crusades as sins against the Holy Spirit:

In the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Ori-ent and Occident out of which our civilization has grown, the Crusades were a tragic and destructive episode. The his-torian as he gazes back across the centuries at their gallant story must find his admiration overcast by sorrow as the wit-ness that it bears to the limitations of human nature. There was so much courage and so little honor, so much devotion and so little understanding. High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself was noth-ing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is a sin against the Holy Ghost.29

Happily, Crusades scholarship over the last generation has greatly enhanced our understanding of the Crusading move-ment and overturned much of the erroneous interpretations and fanciful tales of the agenda-driven authors of the past. Modern



scholars are focused on studying the Crusades from the per-spective of the participants and understanding what motivated people to participate in them.30 Yet despite the work of these excellent scholars, popular perception of the Crusades remains fixated in a Protestant/ Enlightened/Runciman orientation.

Catholic Misunderstandings

Even good Catholic writers can find themselves relying on old stereotypes when discussing the Crusades. Fr. Robert Barron’s popular video series and companion book, Catholicism, strikes a condemnatory tone when discussing the Crusades. Referencing the four marks of the Church, Fr. Barron addresses the criticism leveled against the Church’s holiness and remarks, “How could one possibly declare as holy a church that has been implicated in so many atrocities and outrages over the centuries? How could a holy church have supported the Crusades, the Inquisition and its attendant tortures, slavery, the persecution of Galileo... and the burning of innocent women as witches?”31 In Father Bar-ron’s assessment, the Crusades are one example in a long “litany of crimes” in which even high-ranking clergy did “cruel, stupid and wicked things.”32 He even suggests that the saintly Bernard of Clairvaux was probably “wrong, even sinful, to preach the Second Crusade.”33

Fr. Barron’s work in this area betrays a lack of awareness of the recent and authentic scholarship on the Crusades (as well as the Inquisition) and instead relies on old, formulated, and erroneous criticisms of the Church’s historical past. Regretta-bly, the popularity of his (otherwise excellent) series ensures that these false narratives continue to influence the understanding of Catholics today.

Critics of the Church and even those within the Church ar-gue that Pope St. John Paul II addressed the Crusades when during the Great Jubilee of 2000 he “apologized” for the sins of the Church; therefore, Catholics should not view these events in a positive light.



This view is not supported by the facts. John Paul II did not apologize for the Crusades; in fact, he never even mentioned the word during the Day of Pardon on March 12, 2000. In order to set the Church on a renewed footing as it entered the Third Mil-lennium of the Faith, the pope tasked the International Theo-logical Commission34 to study the concept of a purification of memory that aimed “at liberating personal and communal con-science from all forms of resentment and violence that are the legacy of past faults, through a renewed historical and theologi-cal evaluation.”35 On the Day of Pardon, John Paul II requested forgiveness from God for the faults and failings of our brothers and sisters who have gone before us in the Faith. His desire was born from a love of God and the Church in order for it to enter the third millennium free from the sins of Church members in the past. The pope not only asked God for forgiveness for the failings of past members of the Church but also called the Church to forgive those who have trespassed against it.

John Paul also recognized the importance of understanding the historical context in which the events of the past were lived, and he had no desire to pass judgment on our Catholic prede-cessors.36 He did not reject the Church’s historical past, which is replete with examples of mercy, forgiveness, holiness, and grand achievement. In his September 1, 1999 general audience he ex-pressly said that the Church’s “request for pardon must not be understood as an expression of false humility or as a denial of her 2,000-year history . . . instead, she responds to the neces-sary requirement of the truth, which, in addition to the positive aspects, recognizes the human limitations and weaknesses of the various generations of Christ’s disciples.”37

The Church has not apologized for the Crusades because an apology is not necessary. On the contrary, for centuries the Cru-sading movement was integral to the lived expression of the Faith.

An authentic presentation of the Crusades thus centers on viewing them through a contemporary perspective. The Catho-lic historian Hilaire Belloc understood this truism and illustrat-ed it throughout his historical books. In his work on the history



of the great heresies in Christendom, Belloc wrote that “the most difficult thing in the world in connection with history, and the rarest of achievement, is the seeing of events as contempo-raries saw them, instead of seeing them through the distorting medium of our later knowledge.”38

An authentic understanding of historical events begins not with the present time of the historical author, but with the con-temporary time of the participant. Failure to adhere to that prem-ise falsifies history and produces a “reading into” rather than a “learning from” historical events.39 Critics of the Crusades and the Church usually fall into the trap of believing that their own opinion or society is superior to those that came before them.

The International Theological Commission recognized this trap and encouraged those who would presume to judge the actions of Catholics in the past to keep “in mind that the his-torical periods are different, that the sociological and cultural times within which the Church acts are different, and so, the paradigms and judgments proper to one society and to one era might be applied erroneously in the evaluations of other periods of history, producing many misunderstandings.”40 Understand-ing the Crusades from the perspective of those who lived during and participated in them is vital. The movement must also be understood as the lived expression of the vibrant Catholicism of medieval people.

Abandoning the Defensive

The purpose of this work is to present a restored narrative of the Crusades, utilizing modern scholarship in order to give Catho-lics today the tools to answer the critics and defend the Church and its history.

Most people associate the Crusades with armed expeditions by Western warriors against the Muslims in the Holy Land. Al-though that association is not incorrect, it is incomplete. Because the Crusading movement evolved over time, there were many types of Crusades over the centuries, including those against



heretics, pagans, and enemies of the Church. Regardless, this book will concentrate on the major Crusades against the Mus-lims in the Holy Land, Egypt, the Mediterranean Sea, and Eu-rope, precisely because the major misunderstandings about the Crusades centers on these expeditions. Only an authentic pre-sentation of the Crusading movement and its campaigns against Islam can equip Catholics to defend the Church, countering the false historical narrative prevalent in society today with a proper understanding.

At the same time, as the Church progresses through its third millennium and in light of the call by recent pontiffs for a New Evangelization, the time is ripe for a reinvigorated sense of Catholic identity. Catholics must know the authentic history of the Church in order to defend it from the many critics in the modern world; however, for a truly vibrant Catholic identity to flourish once more, defending the Church is not enough. We must go on the attack and present the story of our Catholic fam-ily with vigor, courage, and resolve.

In the words of Walter Cardinal Brandmüller, president emeritus of the Pontifical Committee for the Historical Sci-ences, “[W]e should finally stop being like the frightened rabbit that stares at the snake before it is swallowed by it. This defeatist attitude, this whining self-pity that has gained so much ground . . . in Catholic circles, is an insult to God. What is needed is a new, forceful consciousness of being Catholic.”41


253

Endnotes

1. Rodney Stark, God’s Battalions—The Case for the Crusades (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), 6–7.

2. Which usually involves a negative and unhistorical presentation of such events as the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Spanish Armada, and the reign of Queen Mary (falsely known as “Bloody Mary”).

3. Charlotte Edwardes, “Ridley Scott’s New Crusades films ‘panders to Osama bin Laden,’” The Telegraph, January 18, 2004, accessed February 2, 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1452000/Ridley-Scotts-new-Crusades-f ilm-panders-to-Osama-bin-Laden.html.

4. “Kingdom of Heaven,” accessed February 2, 2013, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0320661/?ref_=sr_1.

5. Christopher Tyerman, The Debate on the Crusades (New York: Manchester University Press, 2011), 1.

6. Ibid., 5.7. See Thomas F. Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades

Updated Edition (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), 209.

8. Kenneth M. Setton, “Lutheranism and the Turkish Peril,” Balkan Studies 3 (1962): 142, in Madden, New Concise, 209.

9. Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades, 210.10. Tyerman, Debate, 67.11. This is the true legacy of the Enlightenment in relation to the Crusades.

As Christopher Tyerman points out, “The legacy of the Enlightenment had established the Crusades as a reference point for cultural commentary as much on contemporary as on medieval society” (Debate, 95).

12. Stark, 6.13. Tyerman, Debate, 67.14. Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades—A History, (New Haven, CT:

Yale University Press, 2005), 298.15. Denis Diderot, Dictionnaire encyclopedique, Oeuvres complètes (Paris,

1821), xiv, 496–511, in Tyerman, Debate, 78.16. Tyerman, Debate, 81, and Hume, The History of England, vol. I, 234,

Stark, 6.17. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman



Empire, vii, 188, in Tyerman, Debate, 85.18. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, book 6, chapter 58.19. Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades, 215.20. Jonathan Riley-Smith, “Islam and the Crusades in History and

Imagination, 8 November 1898–11 September 2001,” Crusades 2 (2003): 158. Quoted in Madden, The New Concise History, 215.

21. Published from 1934–1936.22. Thomas F. Madden, The Crusades—The Essential Readings (Malden,

MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 1.23. Erdmann was not a Nazi; in fact he despised the Nazi regime. He

was conscripted into the Wehrmacht and served as a translator. He contracted typhus in March 1945 and died.

24. Thomas Madden wrote that “Runciman singlehandedly crafted the current popular concept of the Crusades.” Madden, The New Concise History, 216.

25. Tyerman, Debate, 197.26. Ibid., 192.27. Stephen Runciman, “Byzantium and the Crusade,” in Madden, The

Crusades—The Essential Readings, 220.28. Tyerman, Debate, 195.29. Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. III (London: The Folio

Society, 1996), 401.30. Some of these scholars are faithful Catholics, including Jonathan

Riley-Smith, who is a Knight of Malta and began the shift of modern Crusade studies toward a religious-participant view. Another Catholic scholar is Thomas Madden, who teaches at St. Louis University.

31. Robert Barron, Catholicism—A Journey to the Heart of the Faith (New York: Image Books, 2011), 162.

32. Ibid.33. Ibid.34. Headed at the time by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger—later Pope

Benedict XVI.35. International Theological Commission, Memory and Reconciliation:

The Church and the Faults of the Past. 36. The pope’s recognition of the importance of historical context and

the work of historians was illustrated in his Discourse to the Participants in the International Symposium of Study on the Inquisition held on October 31, 1998. He said, “This is the reason why the first step consists in asking the historians . . . to offer help toward a reconstruction, as


ENDNOTES 255

precise as possible, of the events, of the customs, of the mentality of the time, in the light of historical context of the epoch.” In terms of passing judgment on past Catholics, John Paul II said in his Angelus Address on March 12, 2000: “This is not a judgment on the subjective responsibility of our brothers and sisters who have gone before us: judgment belongs to God alone . . . Today’s act is a sincere recognition of the sins committed by the Church’s children in the distant and recent past, and a humble plea for God’s forgiveness. This will reawaken consciences, enabling Christians to enter the third millennium with greater openness to God and his plan of love.”

37. Available online at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/audiences/1999/documents/hf_ jp-ii_aud_01091999_en.html. Accessed March 2, 2013.

38. Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies (Manassas, VA: Trinity Communications, 1987), 127.

39. The full quote is “Reading history from present to past is reading into rather than learning from it.” Steven Ozment, A Mighty Fortress—A New History of the German People (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 8.

40. International Theological Commission, Memory and Reconciliation, 4.2.41. Walter Cardinal Brandmülller, trans. Michael J. Miller, Light and

Shadows—Church History amid Faith, Fact and Legend (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 84.

42. Indeed, there are five different schools of historians, each advocating a different definition of the Crusades. The Generalists believe any Christian religious war fought for God was a Crusade. The Popularists think a Crusade was an eschatological expression of the people. The Traditionalists view only those expeditions launched toward Jerusalem or for its recovery as Crusades. The Pluralists posit that the Crusades were not discrete campaigns but rather continuous expeditions throughout the world. Finally, the Traditional-Pluralists believe the eight traditionally numbered Crusades to the Holy Land and Egypt assist in understanding the general movement but also acknowledge the Crusades took on different forms and encompassed many regions.

43. Jonathan Riley-Smith, “The Crusading Movement and Historians,” The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, ed. Jonathan Riley-Smith, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 8.

44. Tyerman, Debate, 77. In the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries the terms “holy war” and “war of the cross” were used to describe the Crusades.


Documents

—Spencer Robert Author, The Politically Incorrect Guide to ...crusadesbook.com › the-glory-of-the-crusades-sample.pdf · Author, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and